Learn how to create a half drop repeating pattern in Photoshop. Also see how to fill a layer with a pattern and how to scale a pattern in Photoshop.
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Complete transcript from video:
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to show you how to create half-drop repeating patterns in Photoshop. To create a repeating pattern I’m just going to create a new document of a fixed size. So I’m going to make mine 100 x 100 pixels in size, RGB color with a transparent background and I’ll click Ok. I’m going to zoom in here so we can see it a little more clearly on the screen. And I’m going to use a path for mine but you could start with anything you like at all. And I’m just going to click and drag and then click and drag in this direction because I want to make a sort of boomerang shape and click back over the starting point. Now I’m going to select my Direct Selection Tool, click on this point because I want to adjust it and Alt drag to split these two handles from each other, Alt drag again so that I can create this sort of boomerang shape. And I’m thinking that that looks pretty good. So now I’m going to turn this path into a selection by clicking here on the Load Path as Selection. I’m going to display my Layers palette so we can see what’s going on here. I have a color already selected so I’m just going to Alt Backspace Option Delete on the Mac to fill this shape with my color. Now I’m thinking I would like a stroke around this as well so I’m just going to stroke it. I could stroke it from the work path but it’s easier just to stroke this selection. So I’ll choose Edit and then Stroke and then let’s select a darker version of this color for the stroke. And we’ll stroke it in the center. And we’ll stroke it by 2 pixels and just click Ok. So there’s my shape and now I can deselect my selection using Ctrl D or Command D on the Mac. So now I have my shape I’m ready to create my half-drop repeat. To create a half drop repeat I have to break this up into four pieces and put it in the corners of the image. Luckily Photoshop can do that for me. So I’m going to start by making a duplicate of this layer and I do that by dragging and dropping it onto the New Layer icon. So I now have two copies of the image. I’m going to turn off the background copy so I have only the top version visible. And now I’m going to choose a filter that’s going to do all the splitting work for me, Filter Other Offset. And the offset filter will break the shape up for me. All I need to do is to tell it what half the distance is of the vertical and horizontal size of this image. Now I set up my image to be 100 pixels by 100 so half of that is 50 x 50. And all I need to do is type 50 and 50 into these boxes. And you can see that Photoshop has now broken this image up into the required pieces. I set the undefined areas to wrap around and just click Ok. And there is the breakup for my half drop repeat. And all I need to do now is to drop this middle shape back into position. And this is exactly the pattern I need for a half drop repeat. So I’m going to choose Select All and then Edit Define Pattern. And I’m just going to click Ok. I could call it something if I want to. I’m not going to bother at this stage. Let’s hide this. And now let’s create an image with that half drop repeats in it. So I’m just going to get rid of these tools over here and let’s create a brand new image File New. Let’s choose a US paper, let’s do it letter size. But I’m going to do it landscape. No background, we’ll just do a transparent background and click Ok. And here’s our image that we’re now going to fill with our half-drop repeat. And we do that using Edit Fill. And here we have in the Fill dialog the option of choosing a Pattern. And your pattern is always going to be the very last one in the list. It’s the last one because you just created it and click Ok. And here’s our half-drop repeat. Now I’m just going to drop a layer in behind this and we’ll fill it with white so I’ll just make white my foreground color, Alt Backspace or Option Delete on the Mac. And there we have our shape filled with our half drop repeating pattern. Now if that’s not the half drop repeat that you wanted but it’s too small or too large we could use a different way of doing this. I’m going to choose Layer New Fill Layer Pattern. I’m going to create it just as pattern fill layer, just click Ok. And now what we’re doing is we’re filling it with our pattern. But since we decided our pattern was either too small or too large, let’s say it was too small, we can now scale it up to 200 percent by typing 200 percent in here and click Ok. And now we have a pattern that is much larger than the original. So there are different options that you have for using your half-drop repeat pattern once you’ve created it in Photoshop.
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this video I’m going to show you have to recolor spirals in Illustrator and we’re going to do it the easy way. Before we start this tutorial I want to show you what we’re going to end up with. I have a shape here that I have been creating in the last few video tutorials. And I’ve showed you how to turn an oval and a circle into a shape like this using Pucker and Bloat and then Transform. And in this video tutorial I’m going to show you how we can recolor this shape. It may not be easy to see unless I point it out but this basic shape actually has a gradient fill in it. It’s a yellow to orange gradient. But the center of each of these flowers is colored orange. And some of these petals have been individually colored with solid colors. And I’m going to show you how you can create not only this Gradient Fill effect but also isolate different areas in this shape to apply different effects to them. So let’s get started. And here I have the basic shape that we’re going to work on. The trick with working with a shape like this spiral here which hasn’t been expanded so right now if I affect the colors on this particular shape I’m going to affect the colors in the entire spiral. The trick is being able to isolate the component parts. We’re going to start by applying our gradient. So I’m going to select the foreground fill and click Gradient. I’m actually going to select one of the built in gradients and we’re going to use orange to yellow gradient. Now it’s not working particularly well. But that’s fine because I’m just going to hide that dialog and go back to the Gradient Tool because now I can drag over the shape to apply the gradient the way I want it to be. If I drag from the outside across the shape the inside of the spiral becomes red and the outside is yellow. If I go the other way the outside of the spiral is red and the inside is yellow. And I just need to pick exactly what I want this shape to be. And by dragging smaller gradients I can affect more of the shape with red and less with yellow or drag the other way to add more yellow and less red. So I’m just going to find a sort of good intermediate position and call that good. The next thing I want to do is to isolate the middle of the shape and then isolate some of these petals. The easiest way to do that is to go to Window and then Layers. Now you may find that the Layers palette is a little bit confusing but it’s actually going to help us a lot here. So this is our main layer and it contains a group and the group has lots of little bits in it. So I’m just going to click these fly out menus so that I can see exactly what’s in my shape. And the thing I’m interested in right now is this bit because it’s the bit in the middle of my flower. So if I click this icon here I’ve isolated just that middle shape. And now I can fill it with whatever I like. So I’m going to choose green because it’s going to be really obvious that it’s happening. And this color is changing throughout the entire shape. Now I can isolate individual bits of my shape so I can select for example this piece here. And this is going to be this object. So I could apply a solid fill to it. I could also apply a gradient fill if I wanted to but I just want to isolate a few of these petals and just change their colors. Let’s have a look at this one. This is two around the path and that’s a good area for me to affect. I’m going to make that blue. And let’s have a look and see which this one is. It’s again two more around and I’m going to make it red. And now that I’ve finished with my layers I can just hide it. And let’s just click outside the shape and this is what we came to do. You can see that we have our gradient fill across the flower. The center of the shape is green and some of these petals have been refilled with solid colors. In future if I want to affect this shape I’m now going to have to be a little bit more discreet. If I want to affect my gradient I can come back in here, target my shape, go back to Window and then Layers and this time I’m going to hide the pieces that I don’t want to affect. So I’m going to hide the blue and the red and the green pieces. Now I have selected only the objects that are filled with the gradient fill. And now I can go back and grab my Gradient Tool and try and build up a different gradient effect for the image. I could even change the entire gradient, change the colors in it. And then when I’m ready to go back I can just redisplay these other pieces so that they are now visible. But you can see that because they weren’t visible when we applied the gradient they’re not actually being affected by it. So there we have our recolored shape. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video tutorial. I’m Helen Bradley. Look out for more of my Illustrator tutorials on this YouTube channel.
Learn how to make spirals in Illustrator using the Transform Effect. This is part 2 of a series of tutorials on making shapes in Illustrator, making spirals from them and then coloring them.
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to show you how to make spirals in Illustrator the easy way. Before we go ahead and make a spiral I want to show you exactly what it is that we’re going to be doing. Here I have a basic shape in Illustrator. I’m just going to show you this shape that I started off with. That’s this one here. I created it in an earlier video. And what I’ve done is taken the shape and created a spiral from it. And it’s very, very easy to do. So let’s go. I’ve got a brand new document here with my shape on it and we’re going to create a spiral. So I’m going to select my shape and choose Effect and then Distort and Transform. And we’re choosing Transform. Transform Effect allows us to do all sorts of things with our shape and we’re going to do quite a lot of the things that we have available to us in this dialogue. The first thing is I’m going to turn preview on so we can see it as we work. And because we want a spiral shape we want some additional copies of this shape and so I’m going to type in here 20 copies. So right now we have 20 copies of this shape but we can’t see them because they’re all stacked on top of each other. So we’re going to start by rotating them. And let’s rotate them through about 30 degrees. Let’s just type in 30. And as you can see already we have something happening. What we’ve got is 20 shapes each rotated by 30 degrees which has given us a something. Now we could stop at this point if we get exactly what we want, but since we came here to do a spiral this is only halfway there. The next thing I’m going to do because my spiral is actually a series of shapes which all have some movement in them I’m actually going to move these 20 copies. And I’m going to move each of them around 24 pixels horizontally and vertically. And what that’s going to give me is something sort of spiral like. We’re almost getting to where we want to be. My next step with my spiral is I would like things to get smaller as we go so I’m going to scale these in a negative direction. I’m going to reduce the size of them to 85 percent of what they were in the first place. So I’m just going to type 85 here and 85 here, and so each successive shape is 85 percent of the size of the one before. Now I think this is going to be all right but I need to do a couple of things to make this spiral look a bit better. Right now the shapes or the copies are rotating and coming out from the center of this original shape. If I change the location I’m going to get a spiral that’s a little bit more offset. The locations that are of more interest to me are anything that is sort of away from the original shape. So any of these would be just fine. I am however quite liking this one because that’s giving me a nice spiral shape. So there’s a spiral shape. One of the options I have selected already and that would make a big difference is this Scale Strokes and Effects. As you can see here I have a really strong, very wide stroke around my shape to begin with. And if I don’t do Scale Stroke and Effects than everything is going to have a 4 to 5 pixel stroke around it. And it’s very heavy when the shapes become very small. If I scale a Stroke and Effects then each of these little shapes has a much smaller stroke around it. Now there are other options such as Reflect Y or Reflect X. This is Reflect X by itself. This is Reflect Y by itself. This is Reflect X and Y. And you can see that we’re getting a sort of different spiral but certainly everything is going around and it’s getting smaller in the middle. That would be an option that you could choose. Once you’ve got the spiral that you want you can go ahead and just click Ok. So this is what we’ve come to. This is our shape. The spiral shape that we’ve created now it’s all based around this original image so if I click and drag on it with the Move tool I can move it into position. So don’t worry as you’re creating your spiral if it goes off the edge of the art board because you can bring it all back in later on because it’s all just attached to this one original shape. Of course if we want to treat it as an entire shape so that the whole spiral becomes the shape then we would just select Object and then Expand Appearance. You can see now that that our shape is in actual fact everything here. So all of these little nodes are editable. So we could come in later on with for example the A tool, the Path Selection tool and we could start working on these areas if we want to do something a little bit different with it. And we would need to expand its appearance to have access to these nodes or these anchors on our lines. But there’s the basics of drawing a spiral in Illustrator. Thank you for joining me. I’m Helen Bradley. You’ll find more of my Illustrator videos on this YouTube channel.
Hello, I’m Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. Today I’m going to show you how to make cool shapes In Illustrator the easy way. Before we get started on this video making shapes let’s have a look at the sort of things that we’re going to do. The first thing I’m going to show you how to do is to create this shape really, really easy. And then having created this shape all I did was duplicate it to make these shapes. And all of this is done with just an ellipse and a circle. And you’re going to see how all of these can be done really, really easily. Let’s get started with a brand new document. Now I’m just using a letter size document, RGB color space. So I’ll click Ok. Let’s just size the document and create an oval. Now I’m going to fill this oval with a purple color, and I’m just going to extend the stroke to about 4 points. Now I’m going to click the move tool to just position it where I want it to be and then select the rotate tool. Now this tool allows me to rotate the shape. And what I’m going to do is set the center point, which at the moment is here in the middle of the shape, and I want it down here. So I’m going to position my cursor there and Alt Click. And this allows me to now rotate around this location here. I want 13 petals on my flower. So I’m going to type 360 divided by 13 and Illustrator will make the calculation for me as to how many degrees I need to rotate this to fit 13 in exactly around the circle. I’m going to click Preview, make sure that it rolls forward, which is exactly what it’s supposed to do, and then click Copy. And now I’m just going to press Ctrl or Command D another series of times and each time I press one of things shapes is created and rotated. And I do that until I have my 13 petals. Now I’m going to add a center to the flower. So I’m going back to the ellipse shape. I’m going to drag in here to create a flower center. Now I want my circle over the middle of my flower so I’m just holding down the Spacebar as I draw it to make sure it goes in correct position. If I hold Shift it’ll be constrained to a circle shape. I’m going to let go now and I’m going to fill this with orange. Ok, I now have my flower shape so I’m going to select it all with Ctrl or Command A, and I’m going to choose Object and then Group. And this will group this object together so now I can operate on it as a single shape. And this is my starter shape. This is the flower that we were going to create. I’m going to select it again and this time Alt or Option drag on it because I want a few more copies of this shape because I want to show you what the possibilities are for working with a shape like this. And the first one we’re going to focus on is this one here, so let’s just zoom into it. I going to select the shape and now I’m going to transform it. I’m going to use Effect Distort and Transform Pucker and Bloat. And what this allows me to do is to create interesting effects. You can see that all I started with was an ellipse and a circle and already I’ve got a shape like this because I have my Preview turned on and I have Pucker and Bloat selected. And I can drag across here and create all sorts of different effects with my shape. If I didn’t have a really thick stroke then I wouldn’t have quite such strong black lines, but you can just determine exactly what you want. And this Pucker and Bloat will give you all sorts of shapes. Just a few extra percent and you’ll get a different shape entirely. So I’m just going to look for a good shape there and when I’ve got it I’m just going to call that done. So there’s one of the sorts of shapes that we can create just using a starting point of an oval and a circle, create a flower and then use Pucker and Bloat to create a shape like this. Let’s have a look at this flower. And this time I’m going to choose Effect Distort and Transform and I’m going to select Twist because twist allows me to twist this shape. You can see that I’m getting those curly ends to my flower. And I can go more or less. So let’s try say 30 degrees and see what that gives us. And it gives us a less of a twist. And if we go to 90 let’s see what we get there. We get a much greater twist. So you can do all sorts of things with your basic flower shape with that twist tool. And finally let’s have a look at another one of these effects. I’m going to choose Effect Distort and Transform again, and this time I’m going to select Tweak because what tweak does is actually fracture this image. You can see that we’ve got a horizontal and vertical setting of 10 percent here. And look what happens when I preview this and then go and really, really tweak it. If I choose between relative and absolute you could see I’m getting a sort of almost graffiti style effect. And it’s all done without having any skills at all in creating shapes beyond an oval and a circle. And you can experiment here with these sorts of options that allow you to get different effects from this tweak tool. So there we have a different effect from our flower. It’s obviously something very, very different but we could use this for example as a background for something later on. If we want to use this you’ll see that whenever we select it we’ve actually got our basic flower shape. Here’s a basic flower shape. Here’s our basic shape. If we want to use it elsewhere in Illustrator we may want to convert this. So we would choose Object and then Expand Appearance. And now we’ve actually got the shapes selected not the original flower, Object, Expand Appearance. And now we’ve got something the vector paths are actually around the physical shape not what it had been before we worked with at, again Object, Expand Appearance. And that would allow us then to come in and do things with the shape itself. Let’s just go and grab an object here and you can see that we can then start rescaling this portion or we can work with it in some way. But we can do things with it because it is no longer a flower shape. And we can do things such as dragging on points and making it all sorts of things. So I’ve totally messed that up there, but you get the idea as to what Expand Appearance will give you in terms of turning this flower shape into a something that then could be taken further in Illustrator, for example a repeat pattern. I’m Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video. Look out for more of my Lightroom, Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials on my YouTube channel.
